Jon Stewart thinks "chaos" would ensue if employers with a moral objection to birth control were exempted from the federal requirement to provide contraceptive insurance coverage to their employees. Watch his commentary, which comes near the end of the clip above, or read this transcript:

BOB SCHEIFFER: Senator Blunt from Missouri, one of your Republican colleagues, he wants a law that would allow anyone who has a moral objection to this to not have to pay for birth control pills. Would you be willing to push that in the Senate?

MITCH MCCONNELL: Of course I'd be happy to support it, and intend to support it.

JON STEWART: Really? Because you know what that would be? Fucking chaos, you realize that, right? That's chaos. (mocking tone) All right, I'm a Christian scientist. I don't have to provide any health care. I don't believe in it. It's all up to your boss. I work for the new head football coach at the high school. I got my new health care plan, and it just says, 'Walk it off, you pussy!'

You can't just decide on your own. We're either in a society or we're not in a society.

His incredulity bespeaks a faulty memory -- and a lack of imagination.

Prior to the federal mandate that employers provide contraceptive care there was not, in fact, "fucking chaos," and Americans did regard themselves as living in a society. It's clear why people like Stewart value the universal provision of contraceptive care. But the conceit that the federal government must either mandate that some employers engage in behavior that violates their conscience or face chaos is alarmist nonsense. Before Obama's heath-care overhaul, there were 50 different approaches to insurance coverage mandates, many of which left employers alone and focused on what insurers had to cover. Pro-contraception activists argue that the old system -- which governed a non-chaotic society -- did an inadequate job affording access to contraception.

I think they're right.

But folks who want to expand access should acknowledge that there are lots of ways to do it, and that it can be accomplished without forcing employers to do anything that they don't want to do.

This insight applies not just to birth control, but to health care generally.

The U.S. could make it much easier for individuals to purchase coverage apart from their employers. The employer-based system is, after all, a creation of government and unusual in the world. Contraception could also be separated from the health-insurance system and subsidized. As an advocate of greater access, I'd favor eliminating the need to get a prescription for birth control. Let people consult a pharmacist and buy it over the counter (a system within which all birth control, or birth control purchased by poor women, could then be subsidized).

Implicit in Stewart's rhetoric about all of us needing to live together is the notion that subsidized contraception for all is broadly popular, and a few conscientious objectors shouldn't be permitted to stand in the way of implementing that consensus. If that narrative is correct, there should be no problem passing a general law to subsidize contraception separate from the health-insurance system. What I suspect, however, is that while there is near-consensus that contraception is a good thing, a Congressional majority couldn't be found to declare it a "right" or a good that government should subsidize for everyone or that employers should be forced to provide. For that reason, the contraception mandate was introduced indirectly. The Affordable Care Act gave bureaucrats the ability to define what constitutes "preventative care." The bureaucrats decided birth control counts; therefore employers must include it when they offer insurance.

Isn't it possible that -- regardless of the merits -- making this judgment via executive branch rule-making rather than the legislative process is itself destructive of our ability to live together in a gigantic, pluralistic country?

Say that a conscience clause is layered onto the present system.

Any chaos that results isn't inherent to accommodating conscientious objections in a diverse society, as Stewart implies. The core problem is that inserting employers between health insurers and individuals created an unnecessary tension between the provision of certain goods and the consciences and preferences of employers. I'm enough of a pragmatist to concede that conscientious objections can't always be accommodated -- that overly broad opt-out provisions would cause chaos in certain instances. But provision of contraception isn't one of them. What the present controversy shows more than anything else is that the employer-based system should be scrapped. Until it is, we'll be needlessly compelling private actors to do things to which they object, even as the unemployed are effectively frozen out of the system.

About the Author

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

Most Popular

Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

In analyzing Doug Jones’s surprise win, the pundit-in-chief misconstrues the race and elides his own role in Moore’s defeat.

Doug Jones’s victory in the U.S. Senate race in Alabama on Tuesday poses a quandary to Republicans at all levels—but to none more than President Trump. The results of the race demonstrate the limitations of both his political power and of his self-appointed role as pundit-in-chief. He is more interested in being right than in winning—but on Tuesday, he did neither.

The president offered a series of somewhat contradictory responses to the race between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. Late Tuesday, he tweeted:

Congratulations to Doug Jones on a hard fought victory. The write-in votes played a very big factor, but a win is a win. The people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time. It never ends!

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.